Choose Your Path: The Best Transportation Investments?

Chamber leadership stresses the importance of investing in the port to our region’s economy while JTA is developing a blueprint for enhanced transit services. Bicycle and pedestrian advocates continue to ask for enhanced access and safety while private companies, like Uber, seek to fill a niche in our market. With needs so extensive and diverse, how can we plan an integrated transportation network that works for everyone?

Choose Your Path: What are the Best Transportation Investments?

Chamber leadership stresses the importance of investing in the port to our region’s economy while JTA is developing a blueprint for enhanced transit services. Bicycle and pedestrian advocates continue to ask for enhanced access and safety while private companies, like Uber, seek to fill a niche in our market. With needs so extensive and diverse, how can we plan an integrated transportation network that works for everyone?

That is the challenge for the North Florida TPO in developing the Path Forward 2040 Long Range. So many needs, so little money in comparison. Five years ago, when the 2035 plan was created, over 170 projects costing nearly $12 billion were identified for the Needs Plan. That number was whittled down to 56 projects costing a little over $5 billion for the final Cost Feasible Plan. Typically, only half of needed projects can be funded unless a new revenue source is identified.

Who sets the priorities and decides what’s in and what’s out? In a large part, you do. There’s an easy way to give input right now by playing

Identify your priorities. You can add comments, mark specific locations on a map and add new priorities.

Create a budget. Allocate funding across multiple priorities.

Prioritize alternative solutions. There are different ways to address a need, so how would do it?

After you complete all of the steps, you can see how your input compares with others.

If you think that participating in online polls or going to public workshops doesn’t make a difference, consider this - based on surveys, web and public meeting input, over $700 million in multi-modal projects were included in the final 2035 Long Range Transportation Plan. Being in the Plan doesn’t ensure that a project will be completed; however projects are not eligible for any federal funding if they are not included in their area’s official Long Range Transportation Plan.